Kasia's Bakery Owner Must Repay Money From Tax Fraud

NEW BRITAIN — A federal judge has ordered the owner of a popular bakery in the Little Poland neighborhood to pay more than $435,000 in back taxes, interest, penalties and fines for cheating on his federal taxes.

Marian Kobryn, 63, was sentenced Friday by U.S. District Judge Warren W. Eginton. Kobryn had pleaded guilty in June to one count of making a false statement on a federal tax return.

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Prosecutors said Kobryn and his wife operated Kasia's Bakery on a cash-only basis, and that Kobryn skimmed than $730,000 in receipts between 2010 and 2013 to dodge taxes. He put the money into his and his wife's personal accounts rather than the bakery's account, and dodged a total of just under $243,000 in taxes, according to court documents.

In what prosecutors described as a relatively "ham-handed" scheme, Kobryn drove around the Farmington Valley to various branches of Farmington Bank, where he made cash deposits of just under $10,000 each in an attempt to elude federal financial reporting rules.

Eginton sentenced Kobryn to one day of imprisonment followed by a year of supervised release. Kobryn has already paid the roughly $243,000 in taxes as well as $50,000 toward the interest, penalties and fine. Egington ordered him to pay the rest within a year.

Prosecutors noted that Kobryn could have been imprisoned for more than a year and a half, but acknowledged that his is in recovery from colon cancer and faces a series of family difficulties. But they also said the Farmington resident, who immigrated to the United States to flee repression, failed his duty as a citizen despite building a highly profitable business with his wife.

"The society that protected their hard-won freedom and nurtured the fertile business conditions that enabled their prosperity does not come cheap," according to a sentencing memo by U.S. Attorney Deidre M. Daly and Assistant U.S. Attorney David J. Sheldon. "The defendant enjoyed the blessings of liberty and democracy without paying his share toward providing and protecting those rights."

"Marian Kobryn is a good and decent man. He is a loving husband, completely devoted to his wife, Kasia. He survived a horrible childhood in Poland, and was subjected there to political oppression," Dow wrote.

"He brought from his native Poland a work ethic that drives him to labor from before dawn to after dusk. He provides for his mentally ill daughter. He cares for his mother in law. He suffers silently and with dignity from poor health," Dow wrote. "Without him, the family business does not survive."